Welcome to my weekly Author Spotlight. I’ve asked a bunch of my author friends to answer a set of interview questions, and to share their latest work.
Today: Chris Gerrib has wanted to be a writer since he was a child riding his bicycle to the library in the small Central Illinois town where he grew up. Since then he spent a tour in the US Navy, got an MBA, and now has a day job with a multi-national software company as a Project Manager. For fun, he plays golf, travels and is a voracious reader. He lives in the Chicago suburbs and is active in his local Rotary Club. He’s had four science fiction novels published and his first mystery novel is coming out soon. You can find out more about him at https://privatemarsrocket.net/.
Author Website: http://privatemarsrocket.net/
Dreamwidth: https://chris-gerrib.dreamwidth.org/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/cgerrib.bsky.social
Thanks so much, Chris, for joining me!
J. Scott Coatsworth: What was your first published work? Tell me a little about it.
Chris Gerrib: My first published book came out in 2012 and had a bit of an interesting history. It is a science fiction novel, Pirates of Mars. It was actually a very loose sequel to a self-published novel called The Mars Run, but when I sold it, the publisher didn’t know about and hadn’t read the previous book.
Both books, and the third book, The Night Watch, are gritty and realistic mid-future novels about a thinly-settled Mars and the lawlessness thereon.
JSC: Do you use a pseudonym? If so, why? If not, why not?
CSG: No I don’t use pen names. Simply put, I don’t feel the need. I’m writing mainstream SF and conventional mysteries / thrillers, so there’s nothing in them I can’t show to my family. Now, were I to start writing erotica, I might have a different answer!
JSC: Do you ever base your characters on real people? If so, what are the pitfalls you’ve run into doing so?
CSG: Not only do I base characters on real people, I’ve used their real names in books! (In the science fiction world, it’s called tuckerization, because a writer named Wilson Tucker did it a lot.) The biggest pitfall is that you can’t use real people’s names for villains. So far, everybody I’ve tuckerized has been pleased.
JSC: How long do you write each day?
CSG: Every day? I’m lucky if I write every week! Having said that, my writing sessions do tend to be long – 3 to 4 hours – and when I’m not writing I’m usually mulling over plot and character points in my head. The bottom line is that, when my butt hits the chair, I write, not stare at a blank screen.
JSC: Do you read your book reviews? How do you deal with bad or good ones?
CSG: I read all my reviews. Good or bad, the only way to deal with them is to nod sagely and not say anything. I will say that bad reviews tend to be a case where I didn’t write the story that the reviewer wanted to read. There’s nothing I can do about that.
JSC: Are you a plotter or a pantser?
CSG: I consider myself a pantser, but what I’ve discovered about myself is that every novel is different. Right now, I’m working on another mystery / thriller, and for that, after getting about a third of the way into the first draft, I had to create an outline.
JSC: Do your books spring to life from a character first or an idea?
CSG: For me, this is a chicken-vs-egg question. You can’t explain an idea in fiction without a character, and the character will inform your idea.
JSC: How did you choose the topic for Strawberry Gold?
CSG: I blame my dad for this novel. Don’t get me wrong – he’s a great person and dad, but not much of a reader. He finds science fiction especially difficult. So the first two or three times he told me “you should write a regular book” (meaning not science fiction) I ignored him. But one day I thought, “you know, he taught me how to use a spoon. Maybe I ought to humor him.”
JSC: What’s your favorite line from any movie?
CSG: Not sure if it’s my favorite, but I use a variant of it all the time. The line is from Casablanca as delivered by Captain Renault. “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”
JSC: What are you working on now, and what’s coming out next? Tell us about it!
CSG: I have two books in the pipeline. The first is a cozy mystery called The Body in the Backyard. In it, a man comes back to the small town he grew up in (same town as in this book) to wrap up his dead father’s affairs and discovers that a body has been buried in the backyard. He then gets pulled into an investigation.
The second book is a science fiction novel called Gunmaker. It’s set on a mid-future space colony in which somebody is compelled to make a gun from scrap metal. Much like Chekov’s gun, it gets fired and things get interesting.
And now for Chris’s new book: Strawberry Gold:
Is the gold real or is Pat on a fool’s errand?
It’s January 1986 and Pat Kowalski has just turned 18 but there’s no cause for celebration. His father is dying and the local bank is foreclosing on their house. Pat talks to his senile great grandmother, who tells him a story about a man dying in front of her in 1894. What she doesn’t tell him is that the man – Mister Good Boots – had been carrying a suitcase worth of gold coins. These coins would be worth a fortune today – if any of them are still left.
But Pat’s not the only person in their small Central Illinois town who needs money. Pat’s classmate Vince is watching his college dream evaporate. Vince has also convinced himself that Pat’s family stole something of great value from his family in the 1920s. He willing to do whatever it takes to right an old wrong. Vince has another advantage – Pat doesn’t know Vince is looking.
The two men are both trying to figure out if there’s any gold left and if so where it is. While they look, they discover a lot about their own history, from bodies buried under an abandoned restaurant to both family’s relationship with Al Capone. It’s a race where the winner gets the gold and the loser gets a bullet.